I work for Red Hat, where I lead JBoss technical direction and research/development. Prior to this I was SOA Technical Development Manager and Director of Standards. I was Chief Architect and co-founder at Arjuna Technologies, an HP spin-off (where I was a Distinguished Engineer). I've been working in the area of reliable distributed systems since the mid-80's. My PhD was on fault-tolerant distributed systems, replication and transactions. I'm also a Professor at Newcastle University and Lyon.

Trying to be objective for a moment, I tend to agree with thesesentiments and particularly with the report from CIOInsight that shows Redhat is the number one vendor for value as rated by CIO’s in 2004 and 2005. Oracle ranked 39 out of 41 (lower is worse!). Makes you wonder. In the UK (and elsewhere I suspect), anyone can sell support for Ford, Honda or Toyota cars (as examples), often undercutting the official franchises. Speaking from personal experience, you do get what you pay for though. If you pay peanuts, you get monkeys. It may cost a little more, but I'm happy to pay for the peace of mind a franchise gives me where my car is concerned.

Monday, October 09, 2006

The Second International Conference on Availability, Reliability and Security (“ARES 2007 – The International Security and Dependability Conference”) will bring together researchers and practitioners in the area of IT-Security and Dependability. ARES 2007 will highlight the various aspects of security – with special focus on secure internet solutions, trusted computing, digital forensics, privacy and organizational security issues.ARES 2007 aims at a full and detailed discussion of the research issues of security as anintegrative concept that covers amongst others availability, safety, confidentiality, integrity,maintainability and security in the different fields of applications.

In conjunction with the ARES 2007 conference, a number of workshops will be organized. Workshop proposals should include the call for papers, the number of papers to be accepted, the contact person, etc. They are to be sent to the Workshop Organizing Committee Dr. Nguyen Manh Tho ( tho@ifs.tuwien.ac.at) by September 10th 2006. Proceedings of the ARES 2007 workshops will be published by IEEE Computer Society Press.

Authors are invited to submit research and application papers following the IEEE Computer Society Proceedings Manuscripts style: two columns, single-spaced, including figures andreferences, using 10 fonts, and number each page. You can confirm the IEEE Computer Society Proceedings Author Guidelines at the following web page:

Here's the call for papers. If you've think you've got anything relevant that the community would be interested in then I encourage you to submit. The WWW conferences have always been a great place to present and meet people.

Submissions should present original reports of substantive new work and can be up to 10 pages in length. Papers should properly place the work within the field, cite related work, and clearly indicate the innovative aspects of the work and its contribution to the field. We will not accept any paper which, at the time of submission, is under review for or has already been published or accepted for publication in a journal or another conference. In addition to regular papers, we also solicit submissions of position papers articulating high-level architectural visions, describing challenging future directions, or critiquing current design wisdom. Queries regarding WWW2007 Web Services track submissions can be sent to Paul.Watson@ncl.ac.uk or Jim@Webber.name.

All papers will be peer-reviewed by at least three reviewers from an International Program Committee. Accepted papers will appear in the conference proceedings published by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), and will also be accessible to the general public via the conference Web site. Authors will be required to sign a copyright transfer form. Detailed formatting and submission requirements are available at http://www2007.org/.

Authors of top-ranked papers from the overall conference will be invited to submit enhanced versions of their papers for publication in a special issue of the ACM Transactions on the Web.